Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays eBook

Against this bitter shrewdness and bleak realism in
the suffering classes it is commonly supposed that
the more leisured classes stand for certain legitimate
ideas which also have their place in life; such as
history, reverence, the love of the land. Well,
it might be no bad thing to have something, even if
it were something narrow, that testified to the truths
of religion or patriotism. But such narrow things
in the past have always at least known their own history;
the bigot knew his catechism; the patriot knew his
way home. The astonishing thing about the modern
rich is their real and sincere ignorance—­especially
of the things they like.

No!

Take the most topical case you can find in any drawing-room:
Belfast. Ulster is most assuredly a matter of
history; and there is a sense in which Orange resistance
is a matter of religion. But go and ask any of
the five hundred fluttering ladies at a garden party
(who find Carson so splendid and Belfast so thrilling)
what it is all about, when it began, where it came
from, what it really maintains? What was the history
of Ulster? What is the religion of Belfast?
Do any of them know where Ulstermen were in Grattan’s
time; do any of them know what was the “Protestantism”
that came from Scotland to that isle; could any of
them tell what part of the old Catholic system it
really denied?

It was generally something that the fluttering ladies
find in their own Anglican churches every Sunday.
It were vain to ask them to state the doctrines of
the Calvinist creed; they could not state the doctrines
of their own creed. It were vain to tell them
to read the history of Ireland; they have never read
the history of England. It would matter as little
that they do not know these things, as that I do not
know German; but then German is not the only thing
I am supposed to know. History and ritual are
the only things aristocrats are supposed to know; and
they don’t know them.

Smile and Smile

I am not fed on turtle soup and Tokay because of my
exquisite intimacy with the style and idiom of Heine
and Richter. The English governing class is
fed on turtle soup and Tokay to represent the past,
of which it is literally ignorant, as I am of German
irregular verbs; and to represent the religious traditions
of the State, when it does not know three words of
theology, as I do not know three words of German.

This is the last insult offered by the proud to the
humble. They rule them by the smiling terror
of an ancient secret. They smile and smile;
but they have forgotten the secret.